LABOR: The Army’s Here Again

The Army had learned by experience: the way to subdue Sewell Avery was by envelopment, not frontal attack. In Chicago last week, Major General Joseph Wilson Byron politely stepped up to Montgomery Ward & Co.’s efficient receptionist Helen Love, asked to see Ward’s stubborn $100,000-a-year president Sewell Lee Avery. Over an interoffice phone, she conveyed General Byron’s message. It was: the Army’s here agin.

A secretary led the General into Avery’s paneled office. General Byron handed Avery President Roosevelt’s order directing the U.S. Army to seize Ward’s $302 million mail order and retail business for the second time in seven months. Franklin Roosevelt also ordered Ward’s to obey two War Labor Board directives: 1) to pay retroactive raises to 17% of Ward’s 70,000 employes;* 2) to sign a union contract guaranteeing maintenance of membership. Sputtered Sewell Avery, the New Deal’s No. 1industrial hairshirt: “Arbitrary . . . coercive . . . illegal.” Citing Roosevelt’s failure to act against James C. Petrillo, he added: “If the President can, as he pleases . . . seize the property of some but not of others the nation no longer has a government by law.”

New Tactics. Once again Sewell Avery refused to budge from his office. But this time, no one summoned GIs to carry Avery bodily out of his office (TIME, May 8). General Byron left Avery at his desk, took for himself an adjoining office. For a day, while Signal Corps experts installed an Army switchboard, the General and his staff used a pay telephone down the hall. To get desk space for his clerks and advisers, the General turned the company auditorium into a big office, and piled its usual equipment—including a piano—on the stage. General Byron’s next problem was the refusal of company officials to turn over the firm’s books. But other officers ferreted out the records for themselves and carried on. Avery proudly told newsmen: “I am going to work daily, unless they throw me out bodily. I am still running this place.” But by week’s end Avery had become an executive with no work to do, reduced to playing peekaboo with the photographers. He spent his days in his office conferring with company lawyers, but General Byron ran Montgomery Ward & Co.

Fun In Denver. The Army’s shrewd tactics in Chicago were followed with similar unspectacular neatness in Ward stores in six other cities—Detroit, Denver, St. Paul, Portland (Ore.), Jamaica (N.Y.), San Rafael (Calif.). In Detroit, which WLB Chairman William H. Davis had described as “explosive,” union men gleefully broke a 19-day-old picket line when the Army took over. In the previous three weeks, gangs of vandals had three times invaded Ward stores in Detroit, overturning counters, trampling merchandise, smashing fixtures (see cut). Now, pickets marched away, waving U.S. flags. In Denver, Clerk Vera Jean Perkins, seeing the Army take over, played a record of The Army Made a Man Out of Me, three times over the amplifier system, was peremptorily ordered to stop it.

The Administration followed up its seizure by asking a federal district court in Chicago in effect to legalize the President’s Act by sanctioning it. Attorney General Francis Biddle, who painfully remembers his last clash with Avery, was not quite sure how to regard Avery’s present position. In the course of one short press conference, Biddle referred once to Avery as “perfectly harmless,” a few minutes later was describing him as “a tough old guy who will stick to his guns.” At week’s end, irreconcilable old Sewell Avery trumpeted that a court test of the President’s powers was what he wanted most.

*In Detroit alone, WLB orders would give 2,200 Ward employes back pay amounting to $500,000.